Category: Data

People tore themselves away from tweeting about what color that dress is (it’s white and gold, you weirdos) to weigh in on the Top 12 women, and man: people hate Shi. “song choice was terrible. I kno she is much better than that”, “shi can’t sing for shit”, “Shi really shouldn’t have been put through and she’s bombing so bad on this song” were typical comments. Shi had the lowest Twitter sentiment I’ve seen all year.

People also did not like Shannon (the young girl who sang the Pink song). “And now Shannon. The Kristen Stewart of #idol #atonal #awful #affected”. “I’m a Shannon fan, but that was a weak performance. #idol :
Shannon lacks stage presence. #SeeYa #AmericanIdol #Idol”, “Shannon… fell flat. Shouty, pitchy, breath issues, wobbly notes. Thats all. Grade: D”. Not going to disagree with them.

Maddie Walker still had a lot of negative sentiment from last week, when she was chosen over another contestant after a sing-off. Some examples: “still mad about the rachel/maddie thing? so i hope she goes home”, “Maddie looks like a child from Toddlers & Tiaras.”, “Maddie with [deer] in the headlights eyes. School pageant performance.”

Everyone else was above 80%. People had a lot of love for Joey Cook, who sang a Keith Urban song with a quirky accordion arrangement. “Love Joey’s entire shtick & personna.”, “Well Joey Cook definitely gets the most creativity points.”, “I like Joey Cook. Wish I could say the same about that performance.”

Tyanna also got a lot of positives. “Tyanna Jones was absolutely amazing tonight “, “Tyanna Jones has the vocals from heaven, but her movements are jerky and stiff. She needs to feel the music, and move with more sass.” “Tyanna gone gone take it all this year they matter as well give her the loot and the deal now”. Ok then.

I should have a quantitative forecast sometime tomorrow. By all accounts, the results won’t be announced until next week, so be patient.

I’ll have some kind of quantitative forecast tomorrow, which will be sort of ad hoc and will need some explanation and justification. For now, let’s just look at the instant Twitter reaction

Adam registered by far the highest number of negative tweets. He also did badly on the polls at MJs and over at TVLine, near or at the bottom. In other words, it wasn’t just you, a lot of people kinda thought he sucked. “The judges are being ridiculously too nice tonight. Where’s Adam with some tough love” and “I just don’t care for Adam. We had a winner like him last season.” were not uncommon sentiments.

Rayvon, singing Jealous, was near the middle of the pack in popularity polls, but had the second highest number of negative tweets. “I guess Rayvon’s vocals must have sounded better in person than they did on my TV.”, said one, while another commented “Rayvon is bombing those high notes”.

Riley and Nick, on the other hand, had the lowest number of negative tweets, with most people quite positive. Note, though, that Riley did not have a very large number of people tweeting about him compared with many of the others.

The Top 24 has been revealed, and there are a couple picks people are none too happy about.

On the girls’ side, Maddie Walker won a sing-off to take a position, and Twitter was a bit miffed. “I have NEVER been more disappointed in an #Idol decision tha with Maddie & Rachel”, said one user, with another adding “so basically if your pretty you can win over someone who’s a better singer #Maddie shouldn’t have won”.

Katharine Winston also had a fair number of negatives, with one opining “ick god Katherine screeching her way through this song. please cut her”. However, not many people were tweeting about her this week, and so a lot of her score comes from tweets before seeing this week’s performance. I would withhold judgement about Katharine for now. The same is true of Alexis Gomez, whose Spanish language version of a country song didn’t create a lot of buzz.

Lovey James garnered quite a few negatives this week, with one commentator stating “It’s bad enough that her name is Lovey but I don’t think I can listen to her nasally voice week after week.” Loren Lott also had a fair number of complaints like “I’m sorry but Loren Lott’s voice is like nails on a chalkboard”.

No two women were talked about as much as Jax and Shi, and Shi had a few detractors, though not as many as some of the others. “omg shi is terrible. she’s gorgeous but terrible.” said one, with another saying that it was a “Travesty that Jelly wasn’t chosen over Shi.”

Jax fared much better, which is notable because it seems like the more people are tweeting about you, the more haters you have. I saw nearly nobody complaining about her.

Now we turn to the men, where Adam Ezegelian held on to his top spot as the one getting the most negative tweets. “Adam is singing horribly. I hope no one is watching @AmericanIdol tonight. What an embarrassment.” said one watcher. I would note, though, that some of these negatives may be due to people bitching about a different Adam, Adam Lasher, not making it through. Time will tell.

Though he got a fair amount of comments like “Finish puberty then come back.”, I’m appalled that Daniel Seavey is only third-least popular. He generated a lot of buzz, as did Michael Simeon, who was somewhat more popular.

At this point, we’ve only seen short clips of the contestants, and I don’t much think at this point I would be too keen on drawing conclusions. Maddie clearly has cause to worry, and I’d figure that Adam probably does as well. As for the others, I think people really need to see a whole performance before we can say much of anything.

Adam Ezegelian is by far the most controversial pick, with only a 57% overall sentiment and a high number of negative opinions (roughly 25% of tweets were negative). The frizzy hair, schlub-cum-rocker sang “Here I Go Again”, and it was not overwhelmingly popular:

At 60% overall sentiment, and almost 20% negative tweets, I’m not sure the judges made the right pick. Adanna Daru was much more popular, but still seems to suffer from a low number of people talking about her.

Twitter sentiment analysis is an attempt to ascertain from a sample of tweets how people feel about a certain contestant. It’s a convenient, though debatably accurate, way to judge how much people like someone. For instance, someone may try to determine how popular Obamacare is by doing sentiment analysis. He could collect a certain number of tweets from Twitter, and then use an algorithm to determine whether the tweet is positive, negative, or neutral. That algorithm is trained using a large sample set, and seems to do a pretty good job. For American Idol contestants, a tweet that says “My faves are Tion, Daniel & Trevor #idol” would indicate that the user was positive about Trevor, whereas a tweet like “oh and I guess Trevor’s not so bad either @TrevorDmusic” would be more neutral. A tweet like “Watching tonight’s #Idol. So annoyed that Shi and that kid keeps getting through, Shi is good but completely unoriginal. #idol” would be decidedly negative. But you notice that that tweet also probably refers to Trevor negatively, but wasn’t counted as such because it did not mention Trevor by name.

Here are my results for the current Twitter sentiment for the Top 24:

We’re still pretty early on, so the volume of tweets is not huge for some of these contestants yet. Jax and Daniel have picked up quite a lot of Twitter followers and are rated rather popular, with a low number of negative tweets. Trevor and Alexis have a lot of negative tweets, but with smaller tweet volume. I collected up to 500 tweets, or however many were available. I expect this will increase substantially as we proceed.